Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  What did anyone really know about the Spacers anyway? That they favored La Mirage with laundered sorcery? That they manufactured electronic components beyond the Sierras using black power sources? That their black science had been handed down in a direct line of evil perfect masters extending back beyond the Smash?

  But how much was legend and how much was fact? Truth was, no one really wanted to know, and Sue already had the feeling that she knew more than was good for her as the "Project Manager" settled himself in a chair behind the desk and fixed her with those eyes of fiery ice.

  "Arnold Harker, Project Manager of Operation Enterprise," the Spacer said coldly. "First I will tell you something that will cause you to loathe me; then I will tell you a wonderful thing that will change your mind and your life."

  Sue stared back woodenly at this strange creature. It was hard for even the Queen of Word of Mouth to think of a comeback to a statement like that!

  "You have been brought here as part of the scenario for Operation Enterprise," the sorcerer continued brusquely. "You were selected as the optimum female operative by a program factoring in all known parameters, so rest assured, we know what we're doing. The nominality with which the scenario has been actualized thus far is further proof of that—you are here and Clear Blue Lou is in La Mirage to give justice in your case, and this was the sole goal of phase one of the scenario. You will go operational in the next phase. Your assignment is to bring Clear Blue Lou to us."

  "You're right so far, you fucker, I loathe you!" Sue snarled, choking on this rotten morsel. "You admit you set me up, and now you expect me to help you abduct a perfect master? Take it and stick it, you dirty sorcerer!"

  But Harker acknowledged this outburst with nothing more than a thin smug smile. "Now I will tell you a wonderful thing that will change your mind and your life," he said. "I will tell you one of the Company's most highly classified secrets."

  He rose dramatically from his chair and struck a pose in front of the picture of planet Earth floating in space. "Once men flew through the air faster than the speed of sound," he said. "Once great cities blazed at night. Once man mastered the secrets of the atom. Once men left their own planet and dreamed of building cities in space, of traveling to other worlds circling far-off stars, of boldly going where no man has gone before."

  He touched a palm to the picture behind him. "Not a painting," he said. "A copy of a photograph taken by an employee of Space Systems Incorporated when the Company was involved in many of the greatest projects of the lost Age of Space. We've kept the dream alive through all these centuries, and now at last the Age of Space will soon be reborn!"

  The sorcerer beamed weirdly at Sue, as if he were already assuming that they were willing fellow conspirators. "This is the wonderful thing I promised to tell you," he said. "Just before the Smash, the Company was involved in the most advanced project of the Age of Space—a great space station and a network of satellites to service it."

  He moved over to the computer and leaned against it, mesmerizing Sue with his unholy fervor, a fervor that for some reason he apparently expected her to share.

  "For hundreds of years we've known what was waiting for us up there. The space station and the satellite network were designed to operate indefinitely on solar power. There's no reason why they shouldn't still be operational."

  He loped over to Sue's seat and stood over her, babbling in a frenzy, or so it seemed to her. "For centuries, the remnants of the Company kept what knowledge they could alive, keeping to the wastelands where the fools who thought us demons dared not go. For centuries, we rebuilt our infrastructure, developed our technology, and labored over plans. For fifty years, we have been laboriously crafting a man-rated space shuttle capable of reaching the Company's space station. Soon it will be ready. And you and I have the honor of being the mid wives, as it were, to the birth of the New Age of Space!"

  He smiled at her. He positively glowed. "Have I not told you a wonderful thing? Have I not changed your mind?"

  Sue goggled up at him. "You're crazy," she said matter-of-factly. "You do realize that? A New Space Age? One Smash wasn't enough for you? You want to make the same mistakes all over again and kill what's left of the world? And you expect me to help you? Just how black do you think I really am?"

  And these are the sorcerers whose aid I've pretended didn't exist? she thought, not like the answer she found bubbling up from the pits to her last question.

  "Black enough, Sunshine Sue," Harker said. He sat back down behind the desk and spoke at her through steepled fingers. "You may lack the vision to share the dream of a New Age of Space, but you won't be; able to resist the spinoff."

  He leered at her with infuriating smugness. "Those are broadcast satellites up there in orbit," he said. "A radio network that can cover the world, in place and legally powered by the sun, if your scruples are really so punctilious. That's your payoff for following the scenario nominally. For that, wouldn't you be willing to overlook a little of what you choose to call black science? Might not you be willing to taint your soul a bit to fulfill your dream?"

  "You're... you're serious...?" Sue stammered. "These broadcast satellites really are up there...?" McLuhan had mentioned such satellite broadcast systems; they really had existed. She studied the sorcerer more closely. An evil maniac? Or a man following his own great dream, black though it might be? And if I told anyone my secret dream, wouldn't they call me a sorcerer? "Solar powered...?" she said slowly. "They don't poison the Earth or use atomic power...?"

  Harker grinned fatuously. "White as the driven snow."

  Sue sighed. She looked across the desk at him with hard bargaining eyes. "All right," she said coldly. "Let's hear your price."

  He had told her a wonderful thing which had changed her mind.

  "When our spaceship reaches the station, we'll reactivate the satellite system and give you a ground station that can command it. By relaying your broadcasts through the satellites, you'll be able to reach every operating radio in the world. And all we ask in return is that you help us get the spaceship launched."

  "This ground station you're going to give me, it's atomic powered, isn't it?" Sue guessed. "And this spaceship of yours, I'll bet it's not exactly ultrabright either, right? And you're going to reactivate something actually built by pre-Smash sorcerers... This isn't just gray, it really is black science!"

  "It's science," Harker said, shrugging. "These distinctions of white and black are superstitious drivel. Surely you're intelligent enough to realize that by now."

  A spiritual vertigo came over Sue. Everything she knew of her world told her that she was contemplating a pact with evil. But she didn't feel evil. To her, Harker was evil, but she was convinced he wasn't evil to himself. The world would call her evil if they knew what she planned, just as they would react in a murderous frenzy, a holy war, to the launching of a spaceship by sorcerers. So how to judge black and white, good and evil? How can I consider myself one and this sorcerer the other? And how can either of us hope to realize our wicked dreams?

  "Science or sorcery, it won't work," she said, surprising herself by the tone of disappointment in her voice. "Launch a spaceship, and there'll be a holy war, a jihad, a pogrom. You've survived so far because people fear your power more than anything you've yet done. But if you go this far, they'll fear what you've already done more than what you still might do, and a horde of the whitely righteous will swarm over these mountains and..."

  She grimaced, realizing the ironic truth as it passed her lips. "And in that atmosphere, I wouldn't be able to use the broadcast system I sold my soul for anyway..."

  But Harker just nodded as if all this had been anticipated in that scenario of his. And from what she had seen so far, she wouldn't bet against it. "That's why we need Clear Blue Lou," he said. "If Clear Blue Lou judges our cause just publicly, Aquaria will listen."

  "Clear Blue Lou is going to tell Aquaria that the Spacers are whitely righteous? After you kidnap him?"

&nbs
p; "But we're not going to kidnap him," Harker said. "You're going to seduce him."

  "I'm going to what?" Sue shouted self-righteously. But it was mostly for show. What else could her part in this "scenario" be? They hardly needed her for muscle, now did they?

  "You don't think you can do it?" Harker said slyly. "Rest assured, computer comparison of your personality profiles predicts a high probability of success. And you'll have the advantage of studying his profile, as well as the advice of Company motivators."

  "If I want to seduce someone, I can do it by myself!" Sue snorted in outraged feminine pride.

  "Your self-confidence is heartening," Harker said dryly.

  "So I seduce Lou and then what?" Sue sighed, realizing after the fact that the sorcerer had trapped her again. "You must really think I'm something if you believe I can simply lead a perfect master to you by his crotch." She laughed. "Well, just maybe I can," she owned. "But you don't really believe that even I can make a perfect master think with his cock. Not when it comes to something like this!"

  "The scenario doesn't require that," Harker said. "Inevitable logic has convinced you to follow the scenario, and the logic of the truth will cause Clear Blue Lou to reach the same conclusion when you go through karmic rebirth with him and input what you have learned with the force of shared truth."

  "WHAT!" Sue roared. "Karmic rebirth! You double-crossing bastard, you promised you'd get me out of this mess you put me into!"

  "I said nothing of the kind."

  "You certainly didn't say that this scenario of yours had set me up to be found guilty!"

  "Why fear a mere Aquarian ceremony when in fact the real karmic rebirth has already taken place?" Harker said knowingly. "Hasn't your destiny already been transformed? Doesn't a new persona as creator of the new global electronic village already await you? Haven't you already transcended your previous karma? No, Sue, it is Lou who will freedom of the spirit?"be reborn. He'll taste your truth—the truth we have given you—and he will choose to follow the scenario too."

  "And I'm supposed to trust all that?"

  Harker shrugged. "The scenario is behavioristic," he said. "Your trust is not required. Your motivation does not enter the equation. You'll follow the scenario because you must. You will undergo karmic rebirth with Clear Blue Lou. That sequence is already locked in."

  "You really are an evil son of a bitch, aren't you?" Sue said softly, not without a certain painful admiration for his strange unprecedented style of low cunning. The Spacers really were sorcerers. No one had ever been able to... to control her very karma like this!

  "But I can still choose not to get it on with Lou," she said wanly, trying to salvage some remaining illusion of free will.

  Harker shook his head. "Locked in too," he said. "The programmed confrontation has too much libido behind it. Out of thousands of possibilities, the computer picked you as the woman most likely to fascinate Clear Blue Lou."

  He grinned a sly grin at her, and for the first time, Sue detected a human vibe, nasty though that vibe was. "And of course Clear Blue Lou was chosen as the perfect master most likely to fascinate you," he said.

  "You shit..." Sue whispered. This... this cold demon has programmed a love affair between me and Clear Blue Lou, and he's told me up front there's nothing I can do about it. And gods help me, I believe him!

  But Clear Blue Lou was, after all, a perfect master. Might not he have the power to free both of them from this mind-fuck scenario? She suddenly realized that in Clear Blue Lou, the Spacers were flinging her together with the strongest possible ally she could have against their power. If she could make him one.

  Or was that thought part of the scenario, too?

  "You think of everything, don't you?" she said.

  Harker laughed. "You're beginning to look forward to it, aren't you?" he said.

  "What kind of man are you? Don't you have any feelings? How can you treat people like this?"

  "Like what?" Harker asked ingenuously. He really didn't seem to know what she was talking about.

  "Like things! Like pawns in your game. Don't you Spacers have any respect for freedom of the spirit?"

  "Aren't we all pawns in the game of our choosing?" Harker said with a slight whine. "Haven't you chosen your own destiny for yourself?"

  "I'm beginning to wonder," Sue told him. All the more reason to open my spirit to Clear Blue Lou, she thought. Great gods, how many levels did this game have?

  It seemed to her that Harker was able to use even his own blindness to the feelings of his pawns as one more weapon. He knew they existed; he knew how feelings determined action, and how action altered feelings. He knew all too well that he was committing the sin of bending human spirits to his will by brute psychic force.

  The terrifying, and yes, sickeningly fascinating, thing about it was that he just didn't seem to care. Was that, in the end, what truly made him a sorcerer?

  After her meeting with Harker, Sunshine Sue was shown to a Spartan bedchamber where she was served an unsettling supper built around a huge slab of some unidentifiable meat. Like most Aquarians, she would dare a bit of upper-food-chain fare now and again; the poisons and carcinogens concentrated in the flesh of birds and mammals were cumulative, and it would take a steady diet of the stuff to significantly cut the lifespan. A tainted treat now and then did little harm and the danger added a gourmandizing spice. But this badly cooked Spacer meal had the plainness of commissary food cooked and eaten the same way every night. She guessed that the Spacers ate meat daily. Did that mean they just didn't give a damn about their health, or what?

  She found her door unlocked, and far too wired to sleep, she wandered about the empty cabin at will. The mountain Williams had gone, every door was closed, and the windows of the common room looked out across a dark expanse of lawn on the invisible rock wall behind the eagle's nest. She might as well have been alone in their bleeding space station, floating in the middle of nothing. Cosmic loneliness overcame her. Here she was, warped against her will into the reality of black science, with no kindred soul in all the world to tell her troubles to.

  She was almost glad when she ran into Arnold Harker as she drifted back to her room. Almost? Hell, she was glad. Maybe she could suss this dude out better if she caught him in a personal moment before they released her to do their bidding in the morning.

  Harker, on the other hand, did not seem pleased to find her wandering around in the night. "Why aren't you in your room?" was his cold greeting. From a natural man, it might have been the opening line of a come-on, but from this Spacer, it was simply an expression of distaste. I get no sexual vibe out of this man at all, she realized. Though she was far from burning with passion for the sorcerer, it irked her that he seemed immune to what experience had taught her were her obvious charms, that her femininity availed her nothing with this cold son of a bitch.

  "I might ask you the same question... Arnold," she cooed. I'll get a rise out of you yet, she decided. I'll make you come on so I can have the pleasure of turning you down.

  "I was looking at the stars," Harker said.

  "How romantic."

  "I was searching for unplotted satellites," the Spacer explained drearily. "Hundreds of them were orbited before the Smash. No immediate scientific value, but

  "So at least you have a hobby. How human of you."

  Arnold Harker frowned. His icy eyes suddenly seemed a tiny bit vulnerable. "Why are you so sure I have no feelings?" he said petulantly.

  "Because you don't care about anyone else's feelings, Arnold."

  "I'm a cold passionless manipulator, is that it?"

  "Well aren't you?"

  "You think me cold because I don't share the piddling feelings of your limited little world," Harker snapped angrily, "and yet to the greatest passion of all, you're cold as ice yourself!"

  Well, well, well! Sue thought. He does have some strings after all and I must just have pulled them. "Try me, Arnold," she said.

  "I already have and you di
dn't even know it," he said. He looked at her speculatively. "But I'm willing to try again. Let me show you."

  Oh really? Sue thought. Well what have I got to lose? "I'm all yours," she said. "For the moment."

  But strangely, Harker didn't lead her to his bedchamber. Instead, he took her outside the cabin to a little porch on the roof of the building where a thick black tube pointed up at the starry sky. He sat her down on an upholstered bench by the tube, from which vantage she saw that it terminated in an optical eyepiece at her eye level. "Look through the telescope," Harker said, squeezing in beside her.

  Sue squinted upward into the eyepiece. A circle of stars, millions of them all crammed together, flickered skittishly in the focus of her vision. "What do you see?" Harker asked softly.

  "Stars," she said, trying to make it sound ingenuous rather than snide. "What am I supposed to see?"

  "The destined home of man," Harker told her fervently. "Not the remnants of a once-proud species scrabbling for survival on a ruined planet around an insignificant sun, but worlds without end, ours for the taking. Once they seemed finally within our reach. Then came the Smash and we threw away our chance. You talk of passion? Can you imagine the passion of keeping that dream alive all these centuries, of dedicating your life to redeeming your species no matter what the cost?"

  Sue looked away from the meaningless dancing image in the telescope and stared at Arnold Harker, sorcerer, his face blazing with energy now, wistful yet angry.

  "But you can't understand, can you?" he said bitterly. "That's the final tragedy of it all, a species that can no longer even comprehend what it's lost. We're evil black sorcerers, and that's the end of it."

  "I know what it is to dream of things that were and might yet be again," Sue said somewhat defensively. "And I admit I may have bent my virtue a bit in the process too."

  She leaned forward into his body space and watched him flinch. "But what's really black about your karma is what it's made of you, Arnold," she said. "Maybe this destiny of yours is really worth it to you, but if you ask me, you've paid too high a price to follow it. You tune out other people's feelings, and you end up turning off your own."